The Twelve Wild Swans

by Starhawk

  Asking Questions

  Rose was the child of a difficult family history, which occurred before she was born. Her intuition told her that all was not as it seemed. She asked a million persistent questions, until she found out what she needed to know about her past and her own purpose. Once she found out what she needed to know, she walked out the door of her old castle, away from her old life, into the wild. Now we will use our intuition to ask a million questions about our own lives, and we will find a doorway out of our own castles. We will gain the courage to walk away into the wild, setting out on an unknown journey.

  Let’s allow ourselves to be like Rose. Let’s give ourselves some time and attention and ask persistent questions about our own inner landscape. Where do we feel the shadow of something out of balance? Where do we need inner healing? Whom or what have we lost through no fault of our own? What is this sense of present absence? How do we even know what questions to ask? Of whom? And when?

  Asking the Right Question

  In magic, it’s very important to ask the right question, because Younger Self takes words very literally, as though they were things. Every Witch has her story about how she learned this the hard way. For example, in San Francisco, finding a parking place is a major challenge every day for those who drive. But if I were casting a spell to never have to look for a parking place again, I would have to be very careful about my words. The easiest way for this to come true would be for someone to steal my truck! Then I would never have to worry about parking again.

  So in the same way, when we embark on a journey toward self-healing and transformation in the Inner Path, we have to be careful what we ask for, because we just might get it.

  It’s particularly important to avoid trying to “improve” the self in a way that is actually quite critical or hostile to the self. I’ve frustrated myself for years by using magic to try to “correct” a painful and embarrassing habit of mine: nail-biting. But the more I try to use magic to stop this habit, the more entrenched my Younger Self becomes. She says she likes biting her nails, that it’s comforting.

  Instead of threatening to “improve” my self by taking away her comfort, I need to direct my magic toward discovering powerful and effective ways to comfort myself that are more fun than nail-biting. I received some useful guidance in a recent dream, which suggested that when I’m tired and anxious and start to bite my nails, I could try playing operatic music for myself. Now, I’ve never listened to operatic music in my life! Talking Self was surprised, perhaps even a bit insulted, by this dream guidance. Those reactions can be a good sign that the guidance actually comes from a deep source. Remember, the transformative power of a working must come through Younger Self from Deep Self.

  Taking care when asking the question, or stating the intention of work for inner healing, is very important. Of course, it sometimes takes years of persistently asking the wrong question to find out what might be needed instead. It takes courage and perseverance to keep asking questions. It’s scary to ask questions when the answers may involve making difficult changes or taking new risks. But there is a price to be paid for not asking questions, also.

  Finding Your Questions

  Now it’s time to ask some questions of your own. You may already know exactly what you want to work on in your own inner life. There may be some urgent emotional crisis or health problem that you know needs attention. You may be coming to the Inner Path with a general sense of unwellness or disturbance. Or you may feel terrific and want to keep growing and changing because you’re curious and excited.

  But in Reclaiming, we use magic and enlist the help of Younger Self to choose the questions and develop the intention. So even if you think you know exactly what you want to work for, please try the following exercises. Younger Self may have something to add. There may be some surprises, so bring along your open-mindedness and courage.

  Questioning Exercise: A Mysterious or Disturbing Dream

  Begin keeping a notebook and pencil or pen by your bedside. When you wake up, whether it’s in the middle of the night or in the morning, immediately write down any dreams you remember. It’s amazing how quickly the vivid and important details of a dream vanish, sometimes within minutes of getting up out of bed.

  If you have trouble remembering your dreams, here are some suggestions. Make yourself a dream pillow with fragrant herbs. Bay, mugwort, and jasmine are among the herbs traditionally associated with prophetic dreaming, but there are many more as well. Pray from the bottom of your heart for a helpful dream. Drink a glass of water before going to bed. When you need to get up in the night to go to the bathroom, you may remember a dream.

  After recording several dreams over a period of time, look over what you’ve found. Do you have a dream that you find particularly mysterious or disturbing? Is one of your dreams part of a series that has repeated itself throughout your life or recently? Does one of the dreams include a detail that seems particularly moving or odd?

  If so, your dreams have given you a doorway that you can walk through, if you so choose. Like Rose, you can walk away from the familiar world of your castle, into another world. Ask the Goddess’s assistance, and place your notes, or a drawing of your dream, or an object that symbolizes it, in a safe place.

  If you are lucky enough to be working with friends in circle, you may wish to spend a night telling dreams. We often set a quiet rhythm as a background for our dreamstories by patting our hands on our knees. When we tell dreams in a group, we speak in the present tense—for example, “I am in a long white hallway…” The rhythm, the immediacy of the dream, and its powerful, mysterious images combine to appeal to Younger Self. Sometimes circle sisters may offer gifts and challenges to the dreamer—for example, “I give you a cloak of invisibility, so you can elude the gangsters” or “I challenge you to actually take a walk alone in the woods at night.” The dreamer can choose to accept or reject these gifts and challenges.

  Questioning Exercise: Using Divination

  Many Witches rely on some form of divination to guide and assist them and to give Younger Self a way to speak up. If you are familiar and adept with tarot cards, astrology, runes, or scrying (allowing visions to arise) in crystal, flame, or water, you will know how to do a reading for yourself. If you are new to divination methods, now is a good time to treat yourself to a pack of tarot cards and a good tarot book. I will use the example of the tarot simply because it is the divination tool I use for myself. If you are more comfortable or familiar with some other method of divination, by all means use it.

  Create sacred space, and do a reading for yourself. You will find directions in your book. If you are new to the tarot, please spend some time just gazing at the cards and allowing patterns to emerge, before you look each card up in your book. You may want to make some notes of your own impressions and responses before you open your book, because, like the details of a dream, your own gut-level responses to the images in the cards may vanish in the face of the book’s expert interpretations.

  Now ask yourself which card in the reading is most mysterious or disturbing to you. Which other card in the reading could help you with this mystery or difficulty? Pull these two cards out of the reading, and play with them for a moment. Are you more comfortable with the helpful card covering the mysterious one? Do you like it when the mystery peeks out? Do they belong beside or above one another, or upside down with a potted plant on top of them? Let Younger Self play with the cards, and find what feels right. Then place the cards in a safe place. Like the dream image in the previous exercise, the images in these cards can provide you with a doorway into the Inner Path, away from your old life, and into another world.

  Readings and divination of all kinds are especially valuable when done in circle with friends who know you well. Your circle sisters may see clearly a message that is hiding in one of your blind spots about yourself. We often need this kind of outside perspective and reality check.

  Questioning Exercise: Physical Sensation, Gesture,
or Symptom

  We all have habitual gestures, postures, even illnesses that can provide a doorway into our own inner process. Some people pull an ear or twirl their hair; some people throw their hands in the air when pressured, while others make a fist. Some women stand with their shoulders up around their ears; others slump their shoulders forward to hide their breasts. Others bite their nails or get a stomachache if upset. Sometimes, over the years, these gestures, postures, or symptoms have become so habitual that the original emotion and content of the gesture is lost; we no longer know why we do it. But our body remembers. Younger Self remembers and keeps speaking up in nonverbal body language. If you wish, you may choose a particularly mysterious or frequently repeated physical expression as the doorway into the Inner Path. Draw yourself a picture of your gesture, or find an object that symbolizes it for you, and place it in a safe place, like a question for the Goddess. In circle, you may each wish to choose and demonstrate a gesture or posture that is particularly disturbing or mysterious. Chances are, your circle sisters will be able to throw some light on your question.

  Questioning: A Regular Practice

  Many Witches take time on a regular basis to record dreams, attend to the sensory and postural wisdom of their bodies, and use divination. There are many other intuitive practices that can be used as well. There are body maps, where we draw an outline of ourselves and use art supplies to draw a picture of what we feel in our bodies. There is automatic writing or drawing, where we set a specific time, such as five minutes, and then write or draw continuously, without censoring anything, for the agreed-upon time.

  These ongoing self-studies, which awaken intuition, can be recorded in our Book of Shadows. When we talk these intuitive practices over with our circle sisters, we create a reservoir of understanding for ourselves. Our friends can remind us of the dream we had last year and how it relates to a challenge we may face today. Or they can ask, “If you’re so excited about your job offer, how come you’re twisting your wedding ring, the way you always do when you’re upset?” Dreams, images, sensation, and posture are all part of the nonverbal language of Younger Self. When we deepen and rely on intuitive practices to improve the communication between Talking Self and Younger Self, the wisdom of Deep Self can step forward to take a more active role in our lives.

  Questioning Creates a Doorway

  By now, your questioning has shown you a doorway out of the castle of ordinary consciousness into the world of your own complex inner process. This doorway may be a disturbing image from a card or a dream. It may be a gesture or posture or habit that engages your attention powerfully and that you intuitively know holds some mysterious secrets for your healing process. This disturbing dream, image, or sensation is your personal doorway out of the castle and into the wild, into the work of the Inner Path. Now we will walk away from the rigid, secretive walls of the old castle, as we bind Rose’s story together with our own in order to seek personal healing. We are almost ready to seek the courage we need, but first we must look at our own emotional reactions to the disturbing dream or divination or sensation that is propelling us out of our old way of being, out of the “castle.”

  Walking out the Doorway: Blame

  When Rose asks the right question, she finds out that her intuition was correct: all is not right in the castle of her birth. A dreadful injustice, linked with her own life, took place before she was born. This injustice places a terrible burden on Rose. Now, whose fault is that?

  When we discover some difficulty or shadow in our inner landscapes, we often long to find a bad guy. The first time I did this kind of magical work in a Reclaiming class, I brought a disturbing dream image to class. In the dream I was flying, and my father was on the ground with a gun that shot flames, trying to shoot me out of the sky. During the course of the six-week class, I actually broke out with quarter-sized painful red spots all over my body—a symptom I had never experienced before and have never experienced since.

  Of course I wanted a bad guy to blame, and there was my father, all ready to do the job. It’s true that my father was sometimes a violent man. I was a very sensitive (my mother says overly sensitive) little girl. He scared me a lot when I was very little, and I blamed him. But that’s as far as I had ever gotten. I was still on the ground covered with burn marks, when what I really wanted was to fly free.

  I had to be like Rose. She didn’t cause her brothers to be bound in swan form. Her mother was the one who caused this injustice, before Rose was even born. But Rose can’t live the life she wants without freeing her brothers. In a way, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The question is, What is Rose going to do now?

  In my case, I had to dare to return to the dream landscape and confront my father there. I had to free myself, so that I could fly. With help from my friends in the class, I was eventually able to drop a net over the flamethrower, so that my father couldn’t use it to hurt me anymore.

  In our story, Rose has to summon the courage to leave her home and everything she knows to go find her brothers. It’s not fair that Rose has to pay the price for her mother’s mistake. But it is a universal human condition. We each experience this unfairness, because we each come into this world burdened with the histories of our foremothers and forefathers. We build our lives on their triumphs as well as on their most humiliating errors. We learn our deepest emotional skills and our self-images in the context of families where we have little power as babies and young children.

  The puritanical, or racist, or sexist, or violent cultural backgrounds of our families may have affected us deeply. And that’s naming only a few of the many troubles that beset our families. It’s not fair, but it is very human. And it is not optional. Our mothers and fathers had the same experience in their turn.

  Furthermore, it’s usually quite complex. The puritanical home may have taught self-respect and hard work. The sexist home may have created unbreakable loyalties and love between sisters. The violent home may have created an adult whose psychic powers are incredibly well trained by childhood vigilance and who can now easily tell what other people are thinking and feeling.

  When we dig into our personal process by asking hard questions and being attentive to our intuition, we may discover painful or challenging truths about ourselves and our histories, and we may blame others. In some cases, our troubles may truly be someone else’s fault, as Rose’s were. But if we want to be like Rose, we have to go beyond blaming. We have to walk away from that old castle into the promise of the wild. We cannot afford to tie ourselves to old injustice, which will only keep us stuck inside the lonely, rigid walls of our castles.

  Walking out the Doorway: Shame

  We cannot get out of the difficult journey by blaming the old queen, but how about blaming ourselves? This has been one of the great pitfalls in my own magical healing process. The image from my dream that showed my father shooting me from the sky also included me defeated and falling helplessly.

  It’s tempting to define ourselves by our past experience with its inevitable challenges and injustices. Few of us in this culture, with its burden of racism, sexism, and classism, have been treated entirely fairly or valued as highly as we hoped. In fact, some of us have been treated very badly and seriously harmed emotionally and/or physically.

  Sometimes we can feel so victimized, so fearful of conflict, so abused, that we cannot possibly do anything to help ourselves. It’s important to honestly admit how crippling injustices can be. But it’s equally important to refuse to accept being defined, either by ourselves or others, as helpless.

  Rose could have responded by feeling helpless and stayed in the castle nursing her wounds: “I’ve been lied to all my life. My own mother and father never even told me about my brothers. Now I’m a miserable, lonely person.” Instead, she sets a definite intention: “I’m going to find my brothers and break the spell that binds them.” She walks through her own reactions to her family history to do what she has to do. She walks out the door of the castle, into
the wild.

  Finding Courage to Walk out the Doorway

  How does she find the courage to walk out the door? Rose didn’t have to do it all by herself. When the time was right, she questioned her old nurse and got the information she needed. She emerged from that conversation ready to act.

  We also have questions—or rather, our Younger Self has questions—in the form of disturbing images and sensations that we discovered in the exercises earlier in this chapter. We have taken a moment to ask ourselves whether we are stuck in blame or shame as a reaction to these discoveries. Now we are ready to take our questions to the old nurse. She will be able to guide us.

  Meditation: Asking the Old Nurse

  Arrange for some undisturbed time, and either alone or with friends, create sacred space. Prepare yourself to take a trance journey to the old nurse to ask questions and get guidance. Use whatever trance induction works best for you, or use the “Rainbow Induction” trance from the Elements Path in chapter 4.

  Find your way to the Castle of Family Secrets. Walk down its halls; peek into its doorways. Lean your head against the walls and listen. The walls are whispering secrets. What can you hear? Take your time. There are doors leading into the many different rooms of the Castle of Family Secrets. Do you want to explore any of them?

  Find a doorway with a staircase leading downward. Know that this stairway leads to the chamber of the old nurse. Go deeper, on a deep breath, down each of seven steps.

  She was always there to care for you when you were little.

  She was always there to care for you when you were ill.

  She knows all the secrets of your family history.

  She will only tell you things that you are ready to handle.

  She is wise and kind.

  She is very, very old.

  She herself honors the old gods and the Goddess.

  Now you are at her chamber door. Open it and enter. Take a moment to open all your senses to the old nurse and this room, knowing that she is different for each of us. Show her, and tell her, the mysterious image or sensation that you discovered in the previous exercises. She has guidance for you. (Allow some quiet time while each trancer interacts with the old nurse.)